The website Where Peter Is was founded during Pope Francis’s pontificate as a clearing house for articles defending him from his critics. Edited by Mike Lewis – a graphic designer by profession, who lacks academic training in disciplines relevant to doctrinal matters, such as theology, philosophy and biblical studies – it presents itself as having no agenda other than upholding Church teaching. All the same, Lewis has a reputation for imperiously accusing many orthodox and credentialed fellow Catholics of ‘dissent’ or ‘heresy’.
Full disclosure requires noting that I am among those Lewis has tarred with such labels. In 2017, political scientist Joseph Bessette and I published our book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment. It received endorsements from many eminent orthodox Catholic theologians and other academics. Its argument is within the range of opinion that Cardinal Ratzinger explicitly said was legitimate for Catholics, even given Pope John Paul II’s insertion into the Catechism of the prudential judgement that the cases where the death penalty is appropriate are ‘very rare, if not non-existent’.
In 2018, Pope Francis altered the Catechism to rule out capital punishment as ‘inadmissible’. I have argued that the revision is ambiguous between two possible readings. It could be taken as teaching that the death penalty is intrinsically evil. But since that would contradict Scripture and two millennia of previous teaching, it is better read in a different way. On this alternative reading, it says only that execution is wrong given that society can be adequately protected without it. But whether society can be adequately protected without the death penalty depends on questions about which the Church has no special competence – for example, questions about whether capital punishment has significant deterrence value and whether the most dangerous prisoners remain a threat to the lives of prison guards, fellow prisoners and those on the outside whose murders they sometimes order.
Because these questions are matters of social science outside the pope’s purview and about which experts disagree, I argue that the revision is best understood as a prudential judgement which Catholics must respectfully consider, but with which they are not obliged to agree (just as, according to Cardinal Ratzinger, they were not obliged to agree with John Paul II’s prudential judgement on the matter). On Twitter/X, Lewis has, more times than I can count, insisted that this constitutes ‘dissent’. But I do not dissent from any binding teaching. I simply disagree with Lewis about what the revision entails. Nor has Lewis – who agrees that the Catechism does not teach that capital punishment is intrinsically wrong – ever provided a plausible third alternative to the interpretations I argue are the only ones possible.
Curiously, though, Lewis recently allowed Where Peter Is to be a platform for unambiguous dissent from another Church teaching. In his article ‘Thoughts on the Influence of Old Prejudice’, Deacon Douglas McManaman proposed a reconsideration of the doctrine that the sacrament of Holy Orders is reserved to men. The arguments for this teaching, McManaman says, ‘can indeed sound more like theological rationalisations than sound theology’. He suggests that it could turn out that the doctrine ‘is in the end indefensible’. He defends his position by saying that ‘common doctrine is not irreversible’ and that ‘some great theologians have argued rather persuasively that this issue is not at all closed to discussion and debate’.
It is bad enough that by publishing this Lewis encourages Catholics to challenge a doctrine the Church has consistently taught for two millennia. But it is worse than that. The Church has explicitly decreed, contrary to what McManaman says, that the doctrine is not reversible and not open to debate. In Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, John Paul II intended precisely to rebut this assumption. He solemnly pronounced that ‘in order that all doubt may be removed… I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgement is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful’. Note that the pope says that he aims precisely to remove ‘all doubt’ about the matter and that the teaching ‘is to be definitively held’.
When commenting on the document, the pope’s doctrinal spokesman Cardinal Ratzinger added that ‘the Holy Father intended to make clear that the teaching… could not be considered “open to debate”’. As to the degree of assent required, Ratzinger said that ‘it is a matter of full definitive assent, that is to say, irrevocable, to a doctrine taught infallibly by the Church’.
McManaman and Lewis might defend themselves by saying that they have not actually dissented from the teaching, but only advocate discussion. But what McManaman proposes is that the teaching ‘is not irreversible’ and ‘is not closed to… debate’. That directly contradicts John Paul II’s teaching that the doctrine ‘is to be definitively held’ and that ‘all doubt… [is] removed’. It directly contradicts Ratzinger’s statement that the doctrine is ‘not [to] be considered “open to debate”’, that it has been taught ‘infallibly’ and that assent must be ‘irrevocable’. McManaman clearly dissents from these statements. By publishing the article, Lewis is promoting dissent from them.
The problem is serious. The thesis that McManaman is suggesting, and that Lewis is promoting, is that even a doctrine proclaimed by the Church to be ‘irrevocable’ and ‘taught infallibly’ may turn out to be wrong. Naturally, that thesis would undermine not only the teaching on Holy Orders but the entire body of the Church’s doctrine.
Lewis flings the accusation of ‘dissent’ at Catholics who merely propose an interpretation he disagrees with of a non-infallible catechetical revision that is only eight years old. Yet he has published and promoted an article challenging a 2,000-year-old teaching that the Church has declared to be irrevocable and infallible. This double standard casts doubt on the claim of Where Peter Is to be a reliable and unbiased defender of the Magisterium.
Edward Feser is a professor of philosophy at Pasadena City College.
